Query specific number of posts for each post type in specific order

Question

This is related to this other question, I tried with get_posts, pre_get_posts, WP_Query and basically every option I could find for 2 days now, no solution yet.

The full problem in hand: I have 2 post-types, articles and news. A post from "news" can be "featured" or "non-featured". I need to query 1 featured news, 4 articles and 2 non-featured news, and display them on a page in that order. The page uses the page-mypage.php template.

The posts need to be in that specific order because the size of the post changes depending on the type and the "featured" meta option. My grid is using Masonry and the sequence that works to have a full grid (no holes or weird empty space) is featured, article, article, article, article, non-featured, non-featured.

With the get_posts approach in the other question I can't get the pagination working. It works when navigating to /page/X but I tried a bunch of custom pagination solutions that didn't work and paginate_links which I couldn't get to work either.

So now I'm thinking of using a regular WP_Query but how do I tell WordPress I want that many posts from each post-type and in that particular order?

Here's what I really want to do but I can't seem to find a way to do it with WP_Query to make pagination work properly (damn pagination!):

$articles = get_posts(array(
  'post_type' => 'articles',
  'numberposts' => 4
));

$featured = get_posts(array(
  'post_type' => 'news',
  'numberposts' => 1,
  'meta_query' => array(
    array(
      'key' => 'featured-news',
      'value' => 'Yes',
      'compare' => 'LIKE'
    )
  )
));

$non_featured = get_posts(array(
  'post_type' => 'news',
  'numberposts' => 2,
  'meta_query' => array(
    array(
      'key' => 'featured-news',
      'value' => 'No',
      'compare' => 'LIKE'
    )
  )
));

// Merge in the order I need them to appear
$all_posts = array_merge($featured, $articles, $non-featured);

// The loop

Halp!.

Answer 1

You can use WP_Query() with paged array key to pass the current page number:

<?php
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$args = array(
        'post_type' => 'articles',
        'posts_per_page' => 4,
        'paged' => $paged
    );
$articles = new WP_Query($args);
////////////////////////////////
$args = array(
        'post_type' => 'news',
        'posts_per_page' => 1,
        'meta_query' => array(
            array(
                'key' => 'featured-news',
                'value' => 'Yes',
                'compare' => 'LIKE'
            )
        ),
        'paged' => $paged
    );
$featured = new WP_Query($args);
////////////////////////////////
$args = array(
        'post_type' => 'news',
        'posts_per_page' => 2,
        'meta_query' => array(
            array(
                'key' => 'featured-news',
                'value' => 'No',
                'compare' => 'LIKE'
            )
        ),
        'paged' => $paged
    );
$non_featured = new WP_Query($args);
////////////////////////////////
$articles = objectToArray($articles); // objectToArray() function defines below
$featured = objectToArray($featured);
$non_featured = objectToArray($non_featured);
$all_posts = array_merge($featured, $articles, $non_featured);
?>

And because you are query-ing from 3 post types, pagination will fail, because it doesn't know from which post type pagination should be based on!

You can use a manual pagination:

<?php
// $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
if($paged > 1)
{
    echo "<a href=\"".home_url('/')."/page/".($paged-1)."\">Previous page</a>";
}
echo "<a href=\"".home_url('/')."/page/".($paged+1)."\">Next page</a>";
?>

Maybe you want change the HREF attr to something else.

Which I forgot:

<?php
    function objectToArray($d) {
        if (is_object($d)) {
            $d = get_object_vars($d);
        }
        if (is_array($d)) {
            return array_map(__FUNCTION__, $d);
        }
        else {
            return $d;
        }
    }
?>

WP_Query returns a stdClass Object, first you should convert it to an array like below:

<?php
    $articles = objectToArray($articles);
    $featured = objectToArray($featured);
    $non_featured = objectToArray($non_featured);
?>

Then merging them. (updated code above)

Updated

Another handy way is merging stdClass Objects: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1953077/1906508